Deng Xiaoping said that when you open the windows, the flies come in. In the Spring of 1989, China opened its windows wider then ever before to the fresh breezes of freedom. From Deng’s point of view, the flies had come in and needed to be swatted.

One fly had stopped beating its wings today. Hu Yaobang had died, and the government would not announce it for three more days. Then the rumor would brew that he had been swatted. The rumor would be enough to stir up the hurricane of events, the eye of which would sweep across Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and the winds of which would extend out thousands of miles to batter all of China. Eight hundred miles southwest of Beijing, the city of Xi’an where Professor Dan Norton was teaching American literature and Western history would be especially hard hit.

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